FreeNAS ready for the next step – Future of FreeNAS

Olivier Cochard-Labbé, the original founder of the FreeNAS Project, has indicated that FreeNAS is in need of some big modification to remove some of its current limitations (one of the biggest is the non support of easly users add-ons).

This will probably require a full-rewrite of the FreeNAS base.

He also mentions that plans with regards to the future of FreeNAS are:

– Volker, the current FreeNAS project leader and main developer, will create a new project called “‘OpenMediaVault” based on a GNU/Linux using all its experience acquired with all its nights and week-ends spent to improve FreeNAS during the last 2 years. He still continue to work on FreeNAS (and try to share its time with this 2 projects).

– And, a great surprise: iXsystems, a company specialized in professional FreeBSD products and services, has offered to take FreeNAS under their wings as an open source community driven project. This mean that they will involve their professionals FreeBSD developers to FreeNAS! Their manpower will permit to do a full-rewriting of FreeNAS.

Olivier will come back to actively work on FreeNAS and begin to upgrade it to FreeBSD 8.0 (that is “production ready” for ZFS).

Comments

@Scott – moving to OpenFiler may not be an option for ZFS users. I hear it can run on fuse, but that in larger implementations it is not as stable. If native ZFS were a possibility in Linux, I would agree with you.

@Jon: I’ve checked with Volker and he says he’ll stick with Debian Lenny for the moment as he has gained quite a bit of experience on it through his work.
I’d suggest that anybody who wants Debian/Ubuntu with ZFS has a look at Nexenta.